Digest

Former President Alberto Fujimori's trial on charges of ordering death squad killings and kidnappings was postponed Monday after his lawyer requested more time to prepare a defense.

Fujimori faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted in the 1992 slayings of nine students and a professor at La Cantuta University, and the 1991 killings of 15 people in Lima's Barrios Altos neighborhood.

Originally scheduled for Nov. 26, the trial will begin Dec. 10, the Supreme Court said in a statement.

Canada

Trial of serial-killer suspect nears close

The lawyer for a pig farmer accused of being Canada's worst serial killer opened the defense's final arguments Monday by denying the man ever confessed to killing six women.

Robert "Willie" Pickton went on trial last January on the first six of 26 first-degree murder charges filed against him in the deaths of women, most of them prostitutes and drug addicts from a seedy Vancouver neighborhood.

Brazil

Whale may get ride down the Amazon

A whale that swam about 1,000 miles up the Amazon River may get a ship ride back to the ocean, environmentalists said Monday.

The 18-foot minke whale was stranded on sandbars at least twice since first spotted in the Tapajos River, a tributary of the Amazon, last week.